eJazzNews Archive

Avant-Garde Jazz, Arab Lutes, Indo-Jazz Fusion, Standards and Beyond: September 2008

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By John Stevenson

On September 1, 2008, eJazzNews published John Stevenson’s round-up of seven new releases, from a free-jazz reissue to Indo-jazz fusion and Arabic oud with Portuguese fado. It opened with the ESP-Disk reissue of the Lowell Davidson Trio’s 1965 session and welcomed The Monk, the first album by drummer Asaf Sirkis’s trio. Both of Davidson’s sidemen on that session, Gary Peacock and Milford Graves, have since died, and Sirkis has been the drummer of Soft Machine since 2023.

What the round-up covered

  • Lowell Davidson Trio (ESP-Disk): a 1965 session with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Milford Graves, which Stevenson called “a rare and welcome reissue.”
  • Asaf Sirkis, The Monk: the debut of the Asaf Sirkis Trio with guitarist Tassos Spiliotopoulos and electric bassist Yaron Stavi.
  • Wolfgang Muthspiel 4TET, Earth Mountain (Material Records): the Austrian guitarist’s quartet with pianist Jean-Paul Brodbeck and the brothers Matthias and Andreas Pichler.
  • Garaj Mahal, w00t (Owl Studios): funk, rock and Indian music from a band including bassist Kai Eckhardt and guitarist and sitarist Fareed Haque.
  • Rabih Abou-Khalil, Em Português (Enja): the Lebanese oud player’s meeting with Portuguese fado and the singer Ricardo Ribeiro.
  • Marilyn Scott, Every Time We Say Goodbye (Venus): standards with Cyrus Chestnut, Gerald Cannon, Willie Jones III, Paul Bollenback and Ken Peplowski.
  • Marc Rossi Group, Hidden Mandala (Gravity): pianist Marc Rossi’s blend of Indian classical music and modern jazz.

The Lowell Davidson session

Stevenson described Davidson as a gifted pianist recommended by Ornette Coleman and trained as a biochemist at Harvard, and he heard the trio probing “the outer reaches of the piano.” Coleman’s recommendation and Davidson’s biochemistry studies at Harvard are confirmed elsewhere. Two other details need correcting. The review said Davidson died in 1990 at 49 after a laboratory accident; AllMusic repeats the accident story with a different age, while Wikipedia, which gives his birth date as November 20, 1941, says he died on July 31, 1990, at 48 and does not mention an accident. The review also called the trio album his only documented recording. It was his only recording released during his lifetime, but later releases have added a 1985 concert, Graffiti in Two Parts (2012), and tapes from a 1988 session issued by Richard Poole.

Asaf Sirkis and The Monk

Stevenson saw The Monk as the moment Sirkis stepped out from Gilad Atzmon’s Orient House Ensemble. He heard Larry Coryell in “Stoned Bird” and Allan Holdsworth in “Without a Story,” noted that Sirkis wrote all but one of the eight pieces, and praised guest Gary Husband’s keyboards on “The Dream.” Sirkis, born in Petah Tikva, Israel, in 1969, settled in London in 1999 and was a founding member of the Orient House Ensemble. He formed the trio in 2007, and The Monk came out in 2008 on SAM Productions/Egea.

What happened next

Sirkis left the Orient House Ensemble in 2009. His trio followed with Letting Go (2010) and Shepherd’s Stories (2013), and from 2016 he recorded widely for the Moonjune label. In January 2023 he became the drummer of Soft Machine, playing on the band’s 2026 album Thirteen. Muthspiel moved to ECM, where his albums as a leader began with Driftwood (2014). Gary Peacock died on September 4, 2020, at 85, and Milford Graves on February 12, 2021, at 79. For more on Sirkis’s instrument, see our guide to jazz drummers, and for the Garaj Mahal side of the list, our guide to jazz fusion.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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